What is
Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing?
What is Business Intelligence and data warehousing? Unlike
Business Intelligence,
data
warehousing is a well-defined subject area.
However, this does not change the fact that many people,
over
the years, have used the term Data Warehouse
for a
relatively simple data assembly.
Data Warehouses are optimised for analysis and reporting
unlike operational systems which are designed for speedy
transactional processing.
The purpose of Data Warehousing is to create transparency
throughout a whole company’s data, in
order
to make better strategic
and operational
decisions.
For that reason only, the definition of Data Warehousing
must be holistic, yet precise. One of the gurus of Data
Warehousing has defined it in this way:
“A Data Warehouse is a subject-oriented, integrated,
non-volatile, time-dependant assembly of data, which supports
managerial decisions.”
-
Subject-oriented means that
all data concerning the same subject, is collected
throughout the whole organisation. By way of example, a data
warehouse has to comprise all the information about the
company’s sales
– not only about one sales channel.
-
Integrated, means that data types are unidirectional, so
that they
are comparable
despite their varied and heterogeneous sources.
Throughout the data warehouse, you
need a common definition of, for instance, customers.
-
Time-dependant means
that information in the data
warehouse relates to a specific point in time or period of
time.
-
Non volatile means that once data is loaded into the data
warehouse it will not subsequently be updated or modified.
-
Support of managerial
decisions means that the
end-user does not need to know how information is stored.
This imposes very high demands on
data models.
Business Intelligence is a concept, which to a larger extent
than Data Warehouse, has been abused since it emerged. A
number of tool vendors have used it when referring to
solutions or products assembling data for managerial
information or analytical purposes. However, a data
warehouse must be a part of every Business Intelligence
solution, if the concept is to be used correctly.
BusinessMinds regards
Business Intelligence as solutions,
which through Data Warehouse architecture have achieved a
transparency of information and bring it out to the
decision-makers. It can have several different purposes,
from relatively simple, continuous reporting about the
company’s operation to the “feeding” of the analysis
environment. Likewise, there are many tools – but they are
never synonymous with the Business Intelligence solution.
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